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China and the Other Asian Giant: Where are Relations with India Headed?

China and the Other Asian Giant: Where are Relations with India Headed?

A ChinaFile Conversation

MICHAEL KULMA, MARK FRAZIER, SUSAN SHIRK

05.23.13

Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images

Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China, Li Keqiang, right, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wave during a official ceremony in New Delhi on May 20, 2013. Li pledged this week to build trust with India and declared that ties between the Asian giants were key to world peace as he visited New Delhi only weeks after a border spat.

Mike Kulma:

Earlier this week at an Asia Society forum on U.S.-China economic relations, Dr. Henry Kissinger remarked that when the U.S. first started down the path of normalizing relations with China in the early 1970s, the economic relationship and trade between the two countries was virtually non-existent. Amazingly, a similar statement could have been made about India and China as recently as a decade ago. It was at that time, around nine years ago, that the Asia Society published a seminal book on the relationship The India-China Relationship: What the United States Needs to Know. Back then, very few people were looking at the relationship in a sustained and serious way. Two-way trade between the countries was only $3 billion. During an authors’ trip to both countries in advance of publication, and in meetings with local experts, it was apparent that while the Indian interlocuters had thought long and hard about China (and seemed quite concerned by China’s rise), their Chinese counterparts seemed far less interested, and certainly less concerned.

Fast forward to this week, when Premier Li Keqiang has just wrapped up a three-day visit to India, his first visit to a foreign country since taking on his current role. How dramatically the relationship has changed in these last ten years for India to be the first stop on such trip, ahead of traditional partners such as Pakistan. While Premier Li suggested the three purposes of his visit as “enhancing the strategic mutual trust, deepening two-way cooperation and ensuring both sides face up to the future,” economics was front and center during the visit—evidenced by the large business delegation traveling with the Premier and the quick trip to Mumbai, India’s business capital. The numbers further bear out this focus. Building from paltry sums ten years ago, two-way trade between India and China last year was more than $65 billion and is projected to reach $100 billion by 2015. China is now India’s second largest trading partner, and India is a growing presence in China’s economic calculations. In addition, there are spots within the economic relationship which seem ripe for greater future interaction. For example, India’s most recent economic plans suggest a major push on infrastructure in the coming years, and Chinese companies have a strong track record on building out such.

There are still sensitive touch points in the relationship that will continue to challenge the efforts of diplomats on both sides. China’s trade surplus is a source of concern, and the recent border confrontation demonstrated the potential for problems. But in a volatile global economy, with China’s aging population and India’s youth bulge, these two countries need each other. Similar to the conversation on U.S.-China relations, the world needs an India and China that can work together. This trip was a positive next step in achieving that goal.

Responses

The significance of Li Keqiang’s visit to India can be overstated, as is true of any state visit, but I do think that it’s a sign of a continued willingness to improve relations with India by putting aside the difficult issues, especially those surrounding the border dispute. The improvement in relations that Mike Kulma observes over the past ten years shows that a border dispute, to paraphrase Alexander Wendt, is what states make of it.

What is of greater concern than the border dispute is the fact that in both countries, understandings of each other’s history, culture, and much else remain quite shallow among political elites and professionals, to say nothing of the public. Both governments devote ample resources for the training of specialists in general security studies and foreign policy within a handful of top-tier universities and research institutions. Most of these become diplomats or analysts in think-tanks, and few have country-specific training on China or India. This means that only a handful of scholars in China possess a deep knowledge of Indian culture and history, including skills in Hindi and other Indian languages. The same is true for Indian scholars who can speak and read Chinese for their research and who work outside the usual areas of foreign policy and economics.

This too often results in a distorted view of how Indians perceive China and how Chinese look at India. News outlets, blogs, and other foreign policy forums are dominated by non-specialists who nonetheless speak with authority and credibility on how India should handle relations with China, and vice versa. Most often, hawkish views grab the headlines.

I’m describing a problem that we’re familiar with in the United States, which has a long past of government sponsorship of area studies programs only after national security crises and conflicts. Still, for India and China to enjoy the kind of relationship that their leaders profess to want, of mutual understanding and respect, their governments are pursuing a funding strategy that will never get to where they want to be in their bilateral relationship. This requires careful and strategic thinking on how to deepen China studies in India and how to do the same for India studies in China. Governments are not only to blame. In conversations about this issue in both countries, I’m frequently told that few students want to pursue a career as a China specialist or India specialist, let alone undertake the work involved in language training.

This lack of interest in improved understandings of the other civilization is somewhat ironic, as a number of historians have shown. Interactions between the two go back for two thousand years, most famously with the spread of Buddhism to China. Even a century ago, Chinese and Indian intellectuals spoke of a pan-Asian sentiment that tied the two closely together and would provide alternatives to Western culture and its forms of social, economic, and political organization. This spirit of pan-Asianism was revived after Indian independence and the Chinese revolution, but was quickly buried with the 1962 war. I suspect that the pan-Asian concept was not raised during Li Keqiang’s visit, but a few scholars today are taking a keen interest in understanding the historical roots and future possibilities of a pan-Asian regionalism in which Chinese and Indians would revive interactions that flourished in the pre-modern state era.

In the Asia Society volume that Mike Kulma mentions, I wrote a chapter that described the China-India relationship as a “one-sided rivalry.” While much has changed since then, including increasingly active diplomacy and trade between the two countries, the label still applies. India devotes much more attention and emotion toward China than China does toward India.

Indians envy and resent China for its status as a recognized nuclear power, its membership in the most select club of global great powers, the UN Security Council, as well as its attention from the international business community. When India tested a nuclear weapon in 1998, its president wrote President Clinton explaining that they had to do it because of the threat from China.

The Chinese don’t see India as either a security or an economic threat. Beijing’s defense is focused Eastward toward Japan and the United States. The nuclear agreement between the U.S. and India got China’s attention because it looked like a transparent effort to balance against China. But even so, India isn’t very prominent in the consciousness of PRC foreign policy officials, much less ordinary citizens. China’s sang froid sense of superiority toward India just infuriates Indians even more.

It’s interesting that Premier Li Keqiang chose India for his first overseas visit and that President Xi Jinping chose Russia for his first visit. China recently has alienated many of its friends in East and Southeast Asia and may be seeking other friends to ease its sense of isolation. In the past, the Russian government tried to persuade Beijing to join it and New Delhi in an informal bloc to balance against the United States and its allies. The Chinese, however, were reluctant to climb out on a limb with Russia and India instead of trying to establish a constructive modus vivendi with the U.S. I would expect that this caution will still prevail despite a possible short term tactical interest in improving relations with Russia and India.

The ChinaFile Conversation is a twice-weekly, real-time discussion on China news, from a group of the world’s leading China experts. It is published in partnership with <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/china/?utm_medium=ref&utm_source=event&utm_campaign=convo%20about%20link" target=_blank" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Partners','TheAtlanticChinaChannel'])">The Atlantic China Channel</a>.

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Jeremy Goldkorn:Chairman Mao Zedong said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and he knew a thing or two about power, both hard and soft. If you have enough guns, you have respect. Money is the same: if you have enough cash, you can buy guns, and respect.Israel and Saudi...

David Wertime:A new strain of avian flu called H7N9 has infected at least seven humans and killed three in provinces near the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai, with the first death occurring on March 4. Meanwhile, in the last month, about 16,000 pigs, 1,000 ducks, and a few swans...

Jeremy Goldkorn:On March 22, before the foreign media or Apple themselves seemed to have grasped the seriousness of the CCTV attacks on the Californian behemoth, I wrote a post on Danwei.com that concluded:“The signs are clear that regulators and establishment media would both...

Patrick Chovanec:This week’s news that Brazil and China have signed a $30 billion currency swap agreement gave a renewed boost to excited chatter over the rising influence of China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB). The belief, in many quarters, is that the renminbi is well on...

Jeremy Goldkorn:The question is all wrong. China is already transforming Africa, the question is how China is transforming Africa, not whether it can. From the “China shops”—small stores selling cheap clothing, bags, and kitchenware—that have become ubiquitous in Southern...

In his first press conference after taking office as China's new premier, Li Keqiang declared that one of his top priorities would be to fight corruption, because “Corruption and the reputation of our government are as incompatible as fire and water.” This put Li on message...

Dorinda Elliott:China’s recent decision to phase out the agency that oversees the one-child policy has raised questions about whether the policy itself will be dropped—and whether it was a success or a failure.Aside from the burdens only children feel when it comes...

This week, the ChinaFile Conversation is a call for reactions to an article about China's current generation gap, written by James Palmer, a Beijing-based historian, author, and Global Times editor. The article, first published by Aeon in the U.K., “The Balinghou: Chinese...

Dorinda Elliott:At this week’s National People’s Congress, outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao proclaimed that the government kept housing prices from rising too fast. Really? I wonder what my 28-year-old Shanghainese friend Robert thinks about that. He and his fiancée could never...

Orville Schell:What may end up being most significant about the new draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council to impose stricter sanctions on North Korea, which China seems willing to sign, may not be what it amounts to in terms of denuclearizing the DPRK, but what it...

Daniel Rosen:There have not been many new topics in U.S.-China economic relations over the past decade: the trade balance, offshoring of jobs, Chinese holding of U.S. government debt, whether China’s currency is undervalued and intellectual property protection problems have...

Elizabeth Economy:The environment is center stage once again in China. A Chinese lawyer has requested the findings of a national survey on soil pollution from the Ministry of Environmental Protection and been denied on the grounds that the information is a state secret. (The...

Donald Clarke:I don’t have the answer as to whether investment in China will grow or shrink, but I do have a few suggestions for how to think about the question. First, we have to clarify why we want to know the answer to this question: what do we think it will tell us? This...

With regular ChinaFile Conversation contributor Elizabeth Economy on the road, we turned to her colleague Adam Segal, Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Segal said that “the time for naming and shaming has...

Dorinda Elliott:On a recent trip to China, I heard a lot of scary talk of potential war over the disputed Diaoyu Islands—this from both senior intellectual types and also just regular people, from an elderly calligraphy expert to a middle-aged history professor. People seemed...

China is increasingly frustrated with North Korea and may even see more clearly that its actions only serve to increase allied unity, stimulate Japanese militarism and accelerate missile defense. For all these reasons the U.S. should lean on Beijing to—at last—not only help...

Andrew Nathan:The new Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping seems to be making some bold opening moves with its attacks on corruption and the announcement on February 5 of plans to reduce the polarization of incomes. Does this mean Xi is leading China in new directions?&nbsp...

The recent run of air pollution in China, we now know, has been worse than the air quality in airport smoking lounges. At its worst, Beijing air quality has approached levels only seen in the United States during wildfires.All of the comparisons to London, Los Angeles, and New...

James Fallows: Here are some initial reactions on the latest hacking news.We call this the “latest” news because I don’t think anyone, in China or outside, is actually surprised. In my own experience in China, which is limited compared with many of yours, I’ve seen the...

How did the Diaoyu, Spratly, and Paracel islands come to replace Taiwan as the main source of tension for maritime Asia? And how are we to explain the fact that China’s foreign policy toward its Asian neighbors has now morphed from such slogans as: “Keep our heads down, and...

In 1992, Shi Zhengrong completed his doctorate and found himself an expert in a field that wasn’t quite ready for him. He’d studied physics at Australia’s University of New South Wales, focusing on crystalline technology, the basic scientific...